Hotplug/Plug and Play does not work

[Plumbum]

Hello Mint Community,
I am using Linux Mint 8 64Bit and I am very pleased with it except for one weird behaviour.

After I've logged in into Mint I cannot attach a USB or PCMCIA device (I am using a laptop). They are (in some way) recognized but do not work.
The devices I am talking about:
Plextor USB HDD
Creative X-Fi Go USB Sound Card
D-Link DWL-G650 PCMCIA Wlan Card

However, if I attach those devices before I boot they just work fine. I can even remove them and attach them again and they still work (until I reboot without them again).

In Ubuntu all those devices work fine using plug and play.
I've tried to solve this problem on my own but I cannot figure it out.

Terminal output when attaching the devices:

For D-Link DWL-G650 PCMCIA Wlan Card
dmesg:

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pcmcia_socket pcmcia_socket1: pccard: CardBus card inserted into slot 1
[  518.415391] pci 0000:04:00.0: reg 10 32bit mmio: [0x000000-0x00ffff]

For Plextor USB HDD:
dmesg:

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[  967.925752] usb 1-2: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
[  968.075826] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

lsusb finds the hdd:

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Bus 001 Device 003: ID 093b:0062 Plextor Corp.

but fdisk -l does not:

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/dev/sda1               1        1557    12506571    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            1558       14302   102374212+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   *       14303       19457    41407537+   f  W95 Erw. (LBA)
/dev/sda5           14303       14564     2104483+  82  Linux Swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6           14565       16543    15896286   83  Linux
/dev/sda7           16544       19457    23406673+  83  Linux

It only shows my internal hdd.

For X-Fi Go:
dmesg:

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[ 1107.316020] usb 3-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3
[ 1107.556030] usb 3-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

lsusb:

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Bus 003 Device 003: ID 041e:30e0 Creative Technology, Ltd 

All the devices are seen in the gnome-device-manager and correctly described. The Plextor HDD is listed as USB Mass Storage, the X-Fi Go is listed as USB-Audio and PCMCIA card is listed as network controller.

To summarize my problem:
I can only use external devices when attaching them before booting.
When attaching them afterwards they are recognized by some utilities but none of them work.

Hope someone is able to help me.
Have nice holidays,
Plumbum

[Husse]

Before I dig into this I would like to know if any USB device behaves like this or if a pen drive or some such can be attached successfully

[Plumbum]

Before I dig into this I would like to know if any USB device behaves like this or if a pen drive or some such can be attached successfully

I tried one USB pen drive and two more external hard disks (one from Western Digital and the other custom build). None of them works (whichs means they are recognized by lsusb and dmesg but not in Nautilus or by fdisk -l).

[Husse]

The question is what stops the signal from the disks to reach is destination
I don't think it's the case here but it might be a bad CD - did you check the md5sum and burned slowly
You see everything except one small section of the CD may be OK
I'll add this to my list of things to think about
Oh - this is not plug and play but hotplug - not that it matters much

[Plumbum]

Oh - this is not plug and play but hotplug - not that it matters much

I already thought that plug and play was more the Windows description, I just couldn't think of the proper name for it.

The question is what stops the signal from the disks to reach is destination
I don't think it's the case here but it might be a bad CD - did you check the md5sum and burned slowly
You see everything except one small section of the CD may be OK
I'll add this to my list of things to think about

I've come to think about that as well. So I dumped the CD using Brasero and made a md5sum check.
And, well, it is NOT the same...
However, the next thing I did was booting my laptop with the "bad" cd. And hotplug( ) works. Very strange.
I checked my downloaded image and its md5 is fine. So I burned the image again at a low speed, dumped it again, and voilà the md5sum is fine.
Do you think I should reinstall using the "good" disc? Even though hotplug works fine using the "bad" disc in live mode?
Thanks for your help.

[Husse]

It can't hurt - and as you know an install only takes about 15 minutes with a good CD/DVD player
This is also a good time to move your home into a separate partition if you have not done so already, or better create a separate partition for all your data
And the live CD and the installed system are not the same (it's obvious if you think about it - the live CD uses a RAM disk to put things in)
That's an experience some people have all the time....

[Plumbum]

Hey Husse,
I reinstalled Mint using the "good" cd. Right after installation hotplug worked fine.
Then I did all the things I usually do after a fresh installation:

• -customizing grub and some boot options:
  -I have to use cgroup_disable=memory and clocksource=jiffies or my laptop will freeze when connected to a network
  -downloading some packages like opera or truecrypt
  -configuring ndiswrapper so my internal wlan card works
  -updating using the mint update manager
  -changing the language to German as its my native language

Then, after reboot, hotplug does not work again.
One of the things I did after the fresh installation broke hotplug support I guess.
However, if I type into a terminal sudo modprobe usb-storage all the devices work again. When I type sudo modprobe snd-usb-audio even my usb sound card works. I added those two lines to /etc/modules and my laptop now works as it should.

But this doesn't really solve the cause of my problem, does it?
I guess the automatic loading of kernel modules at runtime is somehow broken.
Do you know any way to fix that?
Thanks for your time,
Plumbum

[Husse]

cgroup_disable=memory and clocksource=jiffies

I think this may be the cause of your problems - I've seen hints at this but not a solid explanation
Temporarily remove (or comment out) these boot options and see if hot plug works
There are more alternatives
clocksource=pit and clocksource=tsc
Not sure if they all exists in the present kernel or are possible to use